In 1977, I was fourteen years old and at an awkward stage of my life. I had already been using hearing aids for eight years. My analog hearing aids were clunky, conspicuous and limited in what they could help me hear.

The last thing I wanted was to feel different. Yet there was no hiding the devices attached to my ears or the moments when I missed what someone said. I was learning how to navigate environments that rarely considered how differently people hear. I believed this was mine to manage.

That same year, Judy Heumann and more than 100 protesters entered a federal building in San Francisco and refused to leave until the government acted on Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act . The law prohibits disability discrimination in programs receiving federal financial assistance. It had been enacted in 1973. However, without enforcement regulations, its promise remained largely unrealized. The occupation continued for nearly a month. The pressure helped secure the signing of the regulations on April 28, 1977.

While I was trying to adapt myself to the world, Heumann was demanding that the world change.

Nearly fifty years later, Apple is bringing that history to the screen in Being Heumann , directed by Academy Award winner Siân Heder, the filmmaker behind CODA . The film opens in select theaters on November 6 and arrives globally on Apple TV on November 13.

I did not know Heumann’s name in 1977, although her movement was already changing the world in which I would grow up. Now, Being Heumann has caused me to reconsider what I thought was happening to me.

When Difference Felt Personal

What I knew at fourteen was that hearing could be difficult and frustrating. My hearing aids made me stand out, and there were times when I had to work harder to understand what others seemed to follow with ease.

Like many people, I internalized the challenge. If I missed something, I needed to listen more carefully. If an environment was difficult, I needed to work harder. If I felt uncomfortable, I needed to adjust.

This was the general assumption of the time. The individual was expected to overcome the environment, not question why the environment had failed to consider them. My hearing aids were engineered for amplification rather than designed around the full experience of the person using them. Comfort, identity, listening effort and the emotional experience of a young boy received far less consideration.

Heumann was challenging that same assumption on a national scale. She and the people beside her were demanding the dignity of participating in education, employment, transportation and public life. What had been treated as a personal limitation was also a consequence of systems that had excluded them.

As I write this, Gloria Steinem has recently passed away. Her death brings this history into sharper focus. The feminist movement she helped lead unfolded alongside Heumann’s push for rights and dignity. Each challenged a different set of assumptions society had accepted as normal.

Steinem defined feminism in straightforward terms: the social, political and economic equality of the sexes. Through organizing, journalism and the creation of Ms. magazine , she and other leaders gave women’s experiences language, visibility and collective force. The first regular issue of Ms. was published in 1972 and brought subjects largely overlooked by mainstream media into national conversation.

Heumann and Steinem were confronting the same fundamental challenge: social assumptions that determined who was considered capable, who could lead and whose experience mattered. Women and disabled people alike faced assumptions that limited their independence, ambition, productivity and participation before their abilities were fully recognized.

Both movements showed that experiences people had been encouraged to manage privately were connected to something larger. Human dignity could not depend on a person’s ability to fit into a world designed without them in mind.

What Human Dignity Requires Of Business

Human dignity recognizes that every person has equal worth. Heumann and Steinem challenged institutions to reconsider who could work, lead, create and participate. For businesses, that responsibility is revealed in whom they hire, promote, listen to, design for and consider a customer. The talent had always existed. What changed was the expectation that institutions should recognize it.

In my own work, I describe human variability as the philosophy behind Accessibility 2.0 . It begins with the reality that there is no standard employee or customer. We differ in how we hear, see, move, communicate, process information and respond to the environments around us. Those differences also evolve throughout our lives.

Human dignity provides the moral foundation. Human variability turns that foundation into a business practice.

Compliance asks whether an organization has met a requirement. Human variability asks whether it understands the people it employs and serves. A company designed around an assumed average person can overlook talent, misunderstand customers and miss opportunities that become visible only when different experiences are considered.

Accessibility therefore extends beyond accommodation. It helps organizations question accepted practices and design around how people actually live. The opportunity lies in understanding what human differences can teach us, not treating them as exceptions.

Who Gets To Tell The Story Matters

Being Heumann does not merely tell a story about dignity and participation. Its production had to put those principles into practice.

The actors portraying the protesters have disabilities. Ruth Madeley, who uses a wheelchair, plays Judy Heumann. The ensemble also includes Deaf and blind actors. Their lived experiences bring an understanding that cannot be created through costume, movement coaching or imagination alone.

The production created accessible trailers , adapted its sets and reconsidered its working practices around the needs of its performers. Heder has described the process as creating a map that other filmmakers can follow.

The opening image captures that collaboration. Madeley sits face to face with Heder as they work through a scene. She is not presented as a subject being interpreted by others. She is an actor helping shape how Heumann’s life is brought to the screen.

Human dignity is not always expressed through grand declarations. Sometimes it can be seen in how people communicate and create together. The subject of Being Heumann is a movement that asked institutions to change. The making of the film required its own institution to do the same.

What I Could Not See At Fourteen

That brings me back to the fourteen-year-old I was in 1977.

I cannot return and tell him what Judy Heumann was doing in San Francisco. I can, however, understand him differently. He was not struggling because he had failed to adapt well enough. He was growing up in a society shaped by narrow ideas about hearing, ability and difference.

A movement was already working to change those ideas, even though its effects would take years to reach him.

Today, I use hearing technology that would have been unimaginable to me at fourteen. More importantly, I now have a voice in conversations with companies about the products, workplaces and experiences they create.

That journey did not happen through technology alone. It was made possible by people who challenged the status quo, confronted stigma and insisted that human dignity must come before institutional convenience.

Judy Heumann’s movement demanded a place in the world. Gloria Steinem’s movement challenged who held power within it. Together, they changed who institutions were expected to recognize, respect and serve.

Being Heumann does more than show us what happened in 1977. It asks what we are prepared to do with the dignity her movement fought to establish.